On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (39 page)

At least two points are interesting about the empathy test used in
Blade Runner
. First, we have a kind of deus ex machina or cop-out resolution of the Cartesian problem. How do you know if the thing next to you is a human or an automaton? Give it the empathy test, and if it fails, it’s an android.
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Second, and more interesting, the suggestion that the different replicants have different levels of emotional sophistication (some bordering on real empathy, some completely void) implies that they are different levels of person.

This reflection takes us beyond the film, for we can legitimately ask this same question of the people around us. There appear to be levels of empathy in human beings, from highly sensitive individuals to cold-blooded psychopathic killers. Does having less empathy mean being less human? When we talk of the emotionless individual, we say that he is “cold,” perhaps
even “inhuman.” Is compassion for other beings a defining feature of what it means to be human? Does the inability to feel someone else’s suffering make one less of a person and more like a machine or a monster?

Advances in brain science have lent greater credence to the idea that severe deviance has a biological basis. Dr. Igor Galynker of Beth Israel Medical Center scanned the brains of twenty-two pedophiles and found that they all had below normal activity in the temporal lobe. There are rare cases of men with tumors in their temporal lobe region acquiring a taste for sex with children, having the tumors removed, and subsequently losing the deviant urges.
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The old chicken-and-egg question remains, however; one can always ask whether brain anomalies cause events, or whether events (such as early abuse) cause brain anomalies.
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In some cases, young children who experience violent abuse replicate that abuse as adults, but it remains unclear whether genetic heredity is simply unfolding from genotype to phenotype over generations, or whether the early violent experiences create an unconscious need for revenge (the return of the repressed), or whether childhood abuse actually rearranges the brain in such a way that later callous behavior is more likely. With regard to psychopaths, there seems to be some evidence for all of these causal scenarios.
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Dr. Kent A. Kiehl, a psychiatrist at the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center in Connecticut, studies the relationship between psychopathol-ogy and the brain. According to Kiehl, psychopaths do not fail cognitively so much as fail compassionately: “Psychopaths do know right from wrong, they can tell you right from wrong. They just don’t care.”
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Dr. Kiehl believes there is compelling evidence that psychopaths have abnormal paralimbic systems. The paralimbic system consists of several structures and coordinates emotion and long-term memory. People with damage to their orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the paralimbic system, display increased impulsivity and selfishness; those with damage to the amygdala, another part of the paralimbic system, become cold-hearted and lose their natural fear of threats. Experiments using photographs confirm that people with a damaged amygdala cannot identify dangerous people as dangerous. As Dr. Melvin Konner puts it, “Without an amygdala we are too trusting and bold in approaching people who look dangerous to others.”
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When subjected to brain scans, psychopaths display some of the same diminished brain activity in these paralimbic areas that injured subjects display. Other tests confirm that areas of the brain that ordinarily process or read facial
expressions are crippled in psychopaths; notably, the ability to process fearful faces is diminished, according to Dr. Nicola Gray of Cardiff University’s School of Psychiatry.
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Not only is it harder for psychopaths to read threatening faces, but more significantly, it is harder for them to interpret the faces of people who are afraid. If a psychopath is neurologically less responsive to my pained face (and other indicators), then he might be less likely to stop hurting me if we end up in conflict.

These cases of diminished brain activity in specific loci give us a glimpse into the places where empathy breaks down. Psychopaths may be perceiving other people in purely morphological ways, without sensing much of their inner life (pain, joy, etc.). When most normal people cause pain to another person or just witness it, they have some sympathetic pain themselves. This does not appear to be the case with psychopaths. This has led some researchers to wonder if psychopaths, like some autistics, have a reduced ability to attribute mental states (intentions, beliefs, desires, emotions, etc.) to other people and to understand that others experience subjective states that are different from their own. In other words, the failure of empathy may be a result of a weakened theory of mind.
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That psychopaths can be highly intelligent and calculating but heartless is the subject of Ralph Adolphs’s research at the California Institute of Technology.
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Dr. Adolphs recruited thirty men and women to answer fifty carefully crafted questions involving ethical dilemmas. Six of the subjects had lesions on their ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a region just behind the forehead; twelve of the subjects had other types of brain damage, and the final twelve had no brain damage whatsoever. The ethical quandaries were broken down into two categories: personal and impersonal. In the personal quandaries, subjects were asked “lifeboat” questions, such as, If you had to harm your friend in order to save a large number of other people, could you do it? The cold calculation of utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number) tends to run counter to our natural attachments to people we know. Part of us naturally privileges our own people because we have strong emotional ties to them, whereas strangers (no matter how many) are abstract; we are not emotionally invested in them. Yet even harming a stranger in order to save other strangers usually causes a high degree of aversion in subjects; most normal people hesitate because they feel compassion for the individual who must be sacrificed. While all the other test subjects showed great anxiety and hesitation at the idea of harming a person in order to save others, the people with VMPC lesions were quick and decisive in their decision to sacrifice an individual for the common good. The researchers argued that abnormalities in the VMPC result in lower levels of empathy and compassion.

These biological approaches to psychological tendencies are not strictly reductionistic. For example, the sociobiologist Linda Mealy argued that a form of psychopathy could be genetically passed down, but only an abusive environmental situation might trigger its expression.
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Many people may have dormant psychopathic genes that get triggered only by high-stress hormonal environments. If a child grows up in an abusive home, he may produce the high degree of steroid hormones that trigger psychopathic gene expression, whereas a stable, nurturing family environment might indefinitely gate or prevent psychopathic gene expression.

The journalist Michael Harvey, who spent time with John Wayne Gacy and several other heinous murderers, reminds us of the developmental component of psychopathy:

The common link that binds together most serial killers can be found, perhaps not surprisingly, in childhood. If you dig deep enough, you will find that most serial killers experienced sexual abuse or some other sort of significant physical and mental abuse at the hands of an adult, usually a parent or some other person acting in a position of trust. Often, this abuse is coupled with neglect and general indifference exhibited by other adults who might have been in a position to stop the abuse or otherwise comfort the child who was the subject of the abuse. A typical scenario would be a father who is abusive and a mother who is cold and distant.
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In
chapter 8
I spent considerable time discussing medieval demon possession. The demon monsters of that more theocentric era were slowly transformed by the medical model into diseases. Nowadays
sin
and
possession
have become laughable terms in the official culture of mental pathology. But Carl Jung, in his 1927
Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
, suggested that we have actually gained little with our new scientific nomenclature of mental illness. “Three hundred years ago,” Jung writes, “a woman was said to be possessed of the devil, now we say she has hysteria. Formerly a sufferer was said to be bewitched, now the trouble is called a neurotic dyspepsia. The facts are the same; only the previous explanation, psychologically speaking, is almost exact, whereas our rationalistic description of symptoms is really without content.”
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The point here is that, for the psychopath, no breakdown of his condition into brain chemistry even begins to get at the actual felt experience he’s undergoing. From the phenomenological or psychological perspective, demon possession is a more accurate way of describing the horrible feeling of an uncontrollable invisible force pushing you to do something against your will. The feeling of being controlled by something foreign to oneself is probably the same, no matter what era one lives in. The superstitions
of the earlier age are now metaphysically ridiculous, but the subjective experience is better captured by reference to unnatural agencies than to neurotransmitters.
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“There is absolutely no doubt that people do monstrous things,” says Judge David P. Brodsky. “Don’t get me wrong. I mean, it’s unbelievable, the things I’ve seen. There are some sick people out there, who cross the line in no small way. But if we’re going to be a civilized society, then we have to struggle with the real complexities of crime, and not the cartoon versions of ‘saints’ versus ‘monsters.’” In 2008, I interviewed Judge Brodsky, who was an attorney for the Public Defender’s Office in Lake County, Illinois, for over two decades and who now works as an associate judge in the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Illinois. He thinks the media, with their simplistic “monster” labels, are partly to blame for overdramatizing criminals and closing off real understanding: “The media has an invested interest in fostering these dehumanizing labels—it makes for ‘good TV,’ it creates ratings and profits.” Add to that the fear-mongering of politicians who are “tough on crime” and you have a recipe for public misperception, a picture of crime and punishment that bears little resemblance to reality. “One of the other problems,” Brodsky says, “is that mass communication, by its very nature, tends to oversimplify a message. So when [reporters] cover crime, the complexities are eliminated and criminals get transformed into ‘monsters.’”

“I can safely say,” he states, “that I’ve seen the worst. My colleagues and I in the criminal justice system are some of the select few that really know what a shotgun can do to the human body, or what a butcher knife can do. But no, I’ve never doubted the
humanity
of the criminals. In fact, I usually see the opposite. More often, someone has already been labeled a monster by the state or the media, and then I discover lots of humanity.” Usually complex factors lead to violent crimes, and though that complexity doesn’t make the crimes less tragic, our understanding of these factors helps us to see the human being behind the vitriol. “Here’s a trivial example, off the top of my head,” Judge Brodsky offers.

When I was a defense attorney, we had this teenage kid, who the prosecution was making out to be “monster.” He was part of a group of skinheads who had been arrested after a fight at the beach. He was not at the fight and was not arrested for that. His mates beat two girls. The girls were lesbians and these skinheads were charged with a hate crime. The boy was
mentally disabled, and the skinheads were the only kids who would accept him as a friend, so that’s really why he was a skinhead. Anyway, he goes to his friends’ hearing and after the hearing, as the skinheads are being led away in custody, he gives his buddies the Nazi salute. The prosecutor happens to see this and gets really offended, halting the next case and bringing what he saw to the attention of the judge. He has the kid arrested and they hold him in contempt of court, and they basically demonize him in the heat of the moment. Much later the charges were dropped, because he was not in violation of the law. But it’s a simple example of how complexities are passed over for
caricatures
of good and evil.

To my mind, there’s a difference between a person who does monstrous
deeds
and a monstrous
person
. For example, we represented a guy—a very sweet and normally gentle guy—who’s a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. One day he killed a kid, chopped him up, and buried him in his backyard. He did a very monstrous thing. But I know this guy, and he is definitely
not
in control of his actions. He’s not a monster. Now, he was a clear-cut case of insanity—even the state had to recognize it, but unfortunately most such cases involve people who are further along on the continuum and that makes it harder to determine the issues of free agency.

Brodsky acknowledged that many of the murder cases he’s seen involved relatively isolated explosions of rage. People perceived themselves to be in some desperate, trapped, or affronted state, and then violently lashed out with ruinous result. That doesn’t make them any less culpable for their actions, but it diminishes the tendency to label them monsters. These cases of explosive but relatively uncharacteristic fits of rage (often triggered by drug use) and the capricious actions of the certifiably insane are monstrous
deeds
. But what about the just plain evil? “Well, ‘evil’ is a lot like the word ‘monstrous,’” Brodsky replied,

in the sense that I’d use it to describe specific actions, but not people.
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And I’d probably not even use that term because of its many religious connotations. When I was a defense attorney, I had my clients referred to as “evil” hundreds of times—it’s very common in a trial. Sometimes in the enhancement of a statute, the prosecution and even the legislator will use the language of “brutal and heinous” or “shockingly evil” to describe the acts, and I guess there really is something being communicated by this language. They’re trying to indicate that what they want to punish is the
malignant heart
.